A night at the museum?

Amarjot Kaur

A four-kanal house, numbered 57, in Chandigarh’s posh Sector 5 caught the UT administration’s attention somewhere in 2014, says Deepika Gandhi, director at Le Corbusier Centre and Chandigarh Architecture Museum. By then, the residential building designed and owned by Chandigarh’s first chief architect and town planning advisor Pierre Jeanneret, had served as home to several bureaucrats who had tampered with its original architecture.

“It took us more than three years to bring the house back to its original form—that meant digging out old pictures and texts, even letters belonging to Pierre Jeanneret just to get the basic idea of how the house looked like. Also, the pictures we had were black and white, so getting the colours right was also a tricky part,” says Gandhi while highlighting the preliminary glitches of restoring the house that became the Pierre Jeanneret Museum this March. Its first floor comprising two rooms will soon be open for the public to stay there, informs Gandhi.

“But we won’t just give it to anyone, considering how people had tampered with its architecture before, so this proposal is still underway,” she adds. “We want to make museums more interactive with public and financially viable too. Either CITCO or the department of tourism will take a call on this.” Dedicated to the memorabilia and achievements of Jeanneret, the house is the only residential building in the city that has been converted into a museum.

Brick by brick

“It took me six months just to collect data, drawings and old pictures. Some, I got from the Department of Urban Planning, while others I got from Foundation Le Corbusier in Paris,” says Gandhi. Elaborating on damage repair, she lists the horizontal bands along with windows had been broken, the windows were reversed (they were to open inwards) and the brick jaalis had been plugged in by bricks. “In fact, the entire fireplace was hidden behind a wall. We figured that out with the help of a photograph. While reconstructing it, there was a difference of three inches that a junior engineer suggested was because those days old bricks were used. He brought one and it fit like a glove,” she says.

At present, the museum reflects Pierre’s personal expressions and vocabulary of architecture that romances latticed brickwork. With its foyer being the cynosure leading a spiral staircase to the first floor, and introducing visitors to Pierre’s reflections of beauty in line, shape, and form, also opens into his office and his drawing room on the ground floor. Along with blueprints of several buildings, are Pierre’s handwritten letters to Jawahar Lal Nehru, and others written to his cousin Le Corbusier, among those he wrote to MS Randhawa talking about his problems with the government machinery. At the fireplace, we found Prithviraj Kapoor’s note about Panjab University’s library written in Punjabi that reads:

Akkhaan, dil, tey dimag vaastey
Channana ik tha tey vekhna hove
Tah is liberary’ch aa jave banda
Ajj itthey aake bada hi aanand mileya.

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Know Pierre Jeanneret

He remained in Chandigarh from February 1951 to August 1965, and designed most of the government housing, schools, colleges,  shopping centres, Gandhi Bhawan, Panjab University, and other infrastructure besides supervising the implementation of Le Corbusier’s designs of the Capitol Complex, Museum and Art Gallery, College of Art, City Centre, etc. Such was Jeanneret’s love for the city that as per his ‘will’ his ashes were immersed in the Sukhna Lake of Chandigarh after he died in 1967.

During his stay in Chandigarh he lived in a self-designed house number 57 in Sector 5, from December 1954 to August 1965. Le Corbusier too used to stay in this house during his visits to Chandigarh every year.